Mr. Burke Reviews

Review #24: The Ape, The Bat, Doomed to Die, The Corpse Vanishes Toward the end of the era of video rental and the rise of online streaming, there was a time when discount and dollar stores would sell dollar DVDs of old movies, likely in public domain. I collected a few of these before coming to the realization that if I wouldn't pay a dollar to rent one of these, why am I paying money to own them? The answer is that some of these are classics that would never show up at regular video stores, and with the rise of chain stores pushing the "mom & pop" places out of business, the price to rent was considerably more than a buck anyway. Anyway, I recently had occasion to pull a few videos out of the basement on a mission to view them and then pass them along. Passing along likely means the donation pile, because I'm not sure who might be interested and also owns a DVD player. As it is, I watched these on my desktop PC. I do have a portable player, but the screen i...

Review #23: Los Parecidos a.k.a. The Similars Some friends of mine have watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. I am not among those who have viewed it. It's labelled as being very intense, and that's not something I'm going to binge. I don't need anything that's going to prevent me from sleeping well (more than the usual things that already prevent me from sleeping well). However, I am enough of a fan of the "classics" that one of the aforementioned friends invited a lot of us over to view the 1963 movie The Haunting (which was remade in the 90s). This movie is more of a thriller than a horror film, and it's always a bit off-kilter. Mini-review within a review: you should want this film. The problem was that when the movie ended, the evening was still young, and we needed something else to watch. Trying to figure out what to put on next is as difficult as trying to pick a place to eat. We looked through the horror listings, not wanting an...

Review #22: Like Father If you're old enough to remember when there were only three networks which would fill out their weekly programming schedules with "Movies of the Week", then this Netflix film might be of interest to you. Like Father , starring Kelsey Grammar and Kristen Bell , is reminiscent of some of the better movies of the week of years gone by, only with a slightly better budget and bigger names to drive them. To be fair, Bell has top billing and is the central character, but Grammar is the actor I'm more familiar with and the reason I decided to give it a go. The only thing that I know I've seen Kristen Bell in might be a single episode of Veronica Mars . (Note to self: see if that's available to binge.) Life Father is the story of Rachel Hamilton, a workaholic who gets left at the altar because she can't leave her phone home even on the day of her wedding. (She was late walking down the aisle because she took a work call.) Her estranged...

Review #21: Quantico, season 3 After a long hiatus, Quantico returned to ABC in April as a summer replacement series. I thought it had been cancelled. (And whether it had or not, it has been cancelled now.) After a year working with the FBI, and then a second year working with the CIA, what was there to do? Start a special task force working within the Bureau. I'm glad I waited until the season was over to write this review. My initial reaction was that the first episode was a little weak, and I didn't particularly care about the villain. And then something weird happened: the plot wrapped up. It was solved. Done. Huh? Instead of a seasonal arc, the show had weekly episodes, better suited to fit the task force, and this worked nicely. And then they ruined it. The later half of the season devolved into one continuous story arc, following a single nemesis, who outplayed them at every turn despite the fact that his tactics came straight out of The Art of War . The agents kn...

Review #20: Santa Clarita Diet SPOILER ALERT! The actual Santa Clarita Diet is human flesh! That's right, this is a zombie show. A comedy-horror, mostly life-like zombie show. I didn't know that going in, but it didn't bother me at all. I don't watch zombie shows, but this one is worth it. Santa Clarita Diet stars Drew Barrymore , who I actually haven't seen in anything in years, and Timothy Olyphant , who I can't remember seeing in anything in particular, as a married pair of Realtors (or "Real-a-tors"), Sheila and Joel Hammond, raising a teenage daughter in quiet suburban Santa Clarita. While showing a house, Sheila suddenly gets ill, comedically throwing up -- as in "insane amount of vomit". Joel, at first, thinks she's dead, but she comes around. Fact is, she is dead. Or undead, as the case may be. Sheila discovers that she now prefers raw meat to cooked meat, and all is fine until another agent, Gary, wonderfully played by...

Review #19: Collateral To determine the Emmy Awards, the Academy sends out DVDs with sample episodes of shows to its voters. I don't know how, but someone who worked in my last office left a bunch of these DVDs. Now, most of these discs were useless. Why would I want to see two or four random episodes in the middle of a series? Then I noticed that many of these nominated shows were available online or on Netflix. So I made a note a few that seemed interesting. Collateral was one of these. I knew nothing about it going in, other than it starred Carey Mulligan , whom I enjoyed in Bleak House and Doctor Who . (I didn't realize that both of these were over a decade ago, but there you go.) The pleasant surprise watching the opening credits was discovering that John Simm and Billie Piper , also of Doctor Who, were in the series. Mulligan is Kip Glaspie, a detective trying to solve what appears at first to be a random murder of a pizza delivery man. But, of course, there's...

Review #18: Designated Survivor I recently binge-watched most of the last year and a half of Designated Survivor , which ran for two seasons, but seemed more like four half-seasons. Each midseason break had its own cliffhanger or shocking twist, and after its hiatus, the show seemed to move in a different direction, cleaning up the bits it left behind. So, yes, it sometimes seemed that the writers were making it up as they went along, but I could more gracefully call it "responding to viewer feedback". If it were the latter, it didn't help much. The premise of the show was fair enough, but it didn't allow itself to continue for the long term. Keifer Sutherland is Tom Kirkman, the HUD Secretary, who is left out of a State of the Union address (for some reason, given in September) as the "Designated Survivor". For reasons similar as to why the President and V.P. don't travel together, there is always a member of the line of presidential succession who ...